STILL ALIVE AND KICKING
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A little less than two years ago, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s North Korea comedy, The Interview, spawned the hack of Sony Pictures and a crisis unlike any previous in Hollywood. The experience hasn’t done much to tame them.
In the crudely funny but not crudely animated raunchy comedy Sausage Party, Rogen and Goldberg are again pushing the limits of today’s risk-adverse Hollywood — and Sony is still backing them.
“That experience in no way made us more timid, I don’t think. If anything, it showed how this (expletive) can really hit the mark in ways that you never imagined it would,” says a chuckling Rogen. “But I would probably think twice before killing a living dictator in one of my films.”
No foreign country has lambasted Sausage Party (“Not yet,” notes Rogen). But the comedy’s extreme profanity in a medium most associated with Disney makes Sausage Party an audacious release for any studio, let alone one brought to its knees by a previous film from the duo.
Rogen and Goldberg (co-writers and producers) have been working for nearly a decade on Sausage Party, their own warped version of a Pixar movie, complete with a song by Beauty and the Beast composer Alan Menken. It’s set in a supermarket where food and grocery items believe their salvation lies in being purchased and taken “to the great beyond.”
There’s some of the existentialism of their apocalyptic comedy This Is the End and even hints of the political satire of The Interview. But there’s mostly a staggering amount of double entendre (Rogen stars as a hotdog who dreams of uniting with Kristen Wiig’s bun), a prolonged orgy scene and even a villainous douche.
“The real problem getting it made was not the talking douche or the graphic sexual stuff or the specific statements that it made,” says Goldberg. “The real thing was: Rated-R (restricted) CG film. That was the phrase that stopped the studios from making it. There’s no model.”
The pair — childhood friends from Vancouver turned creative collaborators — spoke separately in recent interviews, Goldberg on the phone from Los Angeles and Rogen over coffee in the East Village, with his dog, Zelda, quietly perched next to him.
In some ways, the fiasco of The Interview is long behind them. They released their holiday comedy The Night Before last November with Sony and have dived into their AMC series Preacher, among other projects.
But both acknowledge the experience of The Interview remains omnipresent.
Their office is still on the Sony lot and they’ve continued to work closely with the studio that, under former head Amy Pascal, fostered their early films.
“I overall remember it sucked. It was just a massive bummer,” says Rogen of the hack.
“It took a long time to emotionally recover from it.”
Sausage Party, gleefully crude and maybe, in the end, surprisingly thoughtful, is certainly “crazy” by today’s ever-narrowing mainstream comedy movie standards. Yet Rogen and Goldberg were able to rope in others: Jonah Hill (who had the original idea), Michael Cera, Salma Hayek (as a taco) and Edward Norton.
Audience response has reminded Rogen of how crowds reacted to This Is the End: “That look of, ‘I can’t believe this got made.’ ” Rogen and Goldberg plan to keep at it. They’re hoping to make a sequel.